I am a Senior Political Contributor at Forbes and the official 'token lefty,' as the title of the page suggests. However, writing from the 'left of center' should not be confused with writing for the left as I often annoy progressives just as much as I upset conservative thinkers. In addition to the pages of Forbes.com, you can find me every Saturday morning on your TV arguing with my more conservative colleagues on "Forbes on Fox" on the Fox News Network and at various other times during the week serving as a liberal talking head on other Fox News and Fox Business Network shows. I also serve as a Democratic strategist with Mercury Public Affairs.

The United States Congress-A Confederacy of Losers

On Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin (L-West Virginia) took to the floor of the United States Senate to issue a dramatic understatement of the obvious, saying, “ It is absolutely inexcusable that all of us find ourselves in this place at this time … with no plan and no apparent hope.”

While Senator Manchin’s remarks were intended to express the frustration and annoyance that so many Americans are feeling today, I note that his comments were ‘understated’ because, were he to actually say what many Americans of all political stripes are feeling, he would have found it completely impossible to avoid using the word ‘losers’ in his presentation.

This is, after all, what the legislative body of the world’s greatest superpower has become—a confederacy of losers.

With less than 24 hours remaining in a fiscal cliff drama that anyone and everyone should, by now, recognize as having become all about a craven need for attention being acted out by a bunch of people all too willing to make us pay for their never having been quite popular enough in high school, it should be clear that—no matter what sort of agreement these folks might manage to concoct before midnight tonight, if any—Congress has failed and failed in truly epic fashion.

Losers.

If you doubt this for a moment, I offer up yesterday’s Sunday morning television talk show circuit as Exhibit A.

On a Sunday morning where every single, solitary elected official drawing a federal paycheck should have been locked inside the U.S. Capitol or the White House busily engaging in the process of finding a solution, there was no shortage of politicians who found time to parade themselves before the cameras for the purpose of repeating accusations of blame that have been overused to the point where the sting of recrimination was long ago lost.

It began with President Obama’s appearance on “Meet the Press” where he devoted far too much of the interview placing the blame for this travesty onto the shoulders of the Congressional Republicans.

As much as I might agree with the President—and I do—I’ve done enough negotiating to know that if you really want to get to a deal, you are going to find it extremely counter-productive to throw accusations and blame into the air during the final hours of the negotiation. Every moment of Obama’s interview would have been better spent selling his fellow Americans on why his approach is the best path for the nation to take.

Naturally, the Congressional Republicans—for whom “maturity” is as much a four-letter word as “compromise”— could not help but take the bait as they fanned out through the TV landscape to hurl accusations at the President.

My favorite pre-school tongue lashing came from the mouth of Senator John Barrasso (L-Wyoming) who, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union”, treated us to, “The president is doing nothing about the addiction that his administration has to spending. He’s the spender in chief.”

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that this childish bit of overused hyperbole is the best one of our elite group of 100 can muster at a time of national trouble?

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Congress is a team; but it’s a team of 100 senators and 435 representatives playing one-on-one without any unifying goal or identity. Self-interest and self-promotion dominate their every thought and action. These financially illiterate, power hungry clowns keep their power by buying votes with taxpayer money. The losers are those who have to pay the expensive promises of Congress.

The childish comments coming from everybody in Washington D.C. reflects directly on the man in the White House. He has been negligent in building constructive relationships with the leaders in Congress. This is the result!

I can only hope that Obama peacefully leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in 4 years.

Congratulations on being able to read. I suppose we are supposed to be impressed. I do, however, appreciate you providing an example of the problem. You see, at a moment when millions of Americans are facing a real crisis, all you can think about is your ideology-as if any of us give a hoot. You don’t even get that your suggestion that this president might not leave the White House when his term ends is a brilliant demonstration of the very thing that is the problem. Fortunately, most Americans are not as ridiculous as you and, even if they cast their vote against this president, are not so stupid as to believe what you find it necessary to hang onto in the face of your own loss. I can’t pretend to understand what fills the mind of those who exist on the fringe of reality, but it is always useful to see examples of it in action.

You comments are always just so pathetic, it’s amazing. _____________________ The childish comments coming from everybody in Washington D.C. reflects directly on the man in the White House. He has been negligent in building constructive relationships with the leaders in Congress. This is the result!

- Seriously? When the first comment out of the GOP’s mouth upon his first election is “Our job is to make sure he doesn’t get re-elected,” how can you honestly blame the president for the lack of constructive relationships with leaders in congress?

“He has been negligent in building constructive relationships with the leaders in Congress.”

One can’t build constructive relationships with people that don’t want to compromise. A congressman is discouraged from compromising in congress because his ideologically homogeneous district won’t relect him if he does.

Blaming the While House instead of the rigidity of the ideological and ignorent voter or the spineless congressman shows how effective conservative propaganda is.

Calling michaelsondergard’s concern for mutiple trillion dollar deficits ‘ideological’ is way off base, IMO. Nothing ideological about thinking it’s insane to dump trillions of dollars in future debt and to stick underfunded Soc Security and other ‘obligations’ onto the backs of our present and future progeny. And of course it matters little to most of us whether our present unsustainable course is part of the “master plan,” or can just plain be attributed to incompetence, I am still “agin’” it.

Social Security is only underfunded becase of spineless politicians who didn’t want to adjust funding, (eg keeping the same income cap formula) to keep up with a cost that was seen decades in advance: retiring of the first babyboomers in 2010 till 2030 when the last of the babyboomers die.

In 1970-1980′s the upper 1% had a taxable income that was about 8 times that of the median. Then for the next 30-40 years it has gradually and crept up to about 20-24 times median income. In the same time period the upper marginal tax bracked was whittled down 90-70% to the current 35%. Corporate taxes have also decreased.

The average executive in 1970-1980 was about 20 times average worker salary, now it is over 200.

Yep the government spends too much but the have’s have been paying proportionally less. All one has to do is look at the graphs of tax rates, taxes collected from the upper 5% and the growth of the deficit to see the temporal connection.

Regarding the Conservative nature of the issue: Gerrymandering leading to ideological homogeniety of districsts is practiced by both D & R but it was Carl Rove that defined it as a long term strategy.

The propaganda remark referred to attributing to the current white house powers what it does not have “building constructive relationships” in a congress committed to make him “a single term president.” I’ve been around for a while and have heard a congress antagonisitic to a bill, a measure, a policy but never to the person in office.

It was Conservatives that have lead the battle to removed many times more people from the voting roles than were ever arrested (let alone convicted) for voting fraud. Conservatives have taken more money from more large donor benifactors. It was Conservatives at the state level that have redistriced more contributing to disenfranchising votes.

Gerrymandering, thanks to the “foresight” of state legislatures, has created districts where the representative from a given party is virtually guaranteed re-election due to the ideological make up of his/her district. There for the representative is acually disouraged from compromizing the ideological principles that the ideological majority voted him/her in for. Gerrymandering and money are the two elements, it seems, that the Supreme Court feels are no threat to democracy and which, if not dealt with,will turn the US into a plutocracy and the average US citizen into a simple drone.